A Longboat Key couple found true love late in life. But what might have been a happy ending has instead morphed into an epic lawsuit with millions of dollars on the line, and long, bitter legal arguments

made mostly by strangers.

By BARBARA PETERS SMITH,

Published: Sunday, April 6, 2014 at 1:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, April 5, 2014 at 10:42 p.m.

When a 70-year-old Missouri hospital-chain heiress met a retired Bacardi rum salesman on a May night in 1997, they fell -- in her words -- "deeply in love."

Claudine and Thomas O'Connor found love late in life. Now, there's a war
over their assets.

Finding each other so late in life made them reluctant to be apart. "Kiss the pillow for me," Claudine O'Connor wrote to her husband, Thomas, when she had to spend a night alone. On their fourth wedding anniversary, she promised "to do everything possible to make each future year as perfect as the last."

Now Claudine, 87, and Thomas, 88, both have dementia, according to doctors. They live in separate states, reportedly looked after by granddaughters, and have not seen each other since shortly after they became wards of the state of Florida in the spring of 2011.

All that's left of their marriage is a complicated and costly three-year lawsuit known as "Butler vs. Saunders."

Neither Claudine nor Thomas have any say in the tangle of matters before 12th Judicial Circuit Judge Peter A. Dubensky. The Longboat Key condo where the two liked to watch the evening sun drop into the Gulf -- and reportedly hoped to live out their days -- has been sold.

Both have been declared legally incapacitated because of their dementia, and both have professional guardians who handle their finances and pay attorneys to speak for them in court. Both have relatives, living outside Florida, who have been drawn into the case over the last three years.

The suit, filed in Sarasota by Claudine's guardian, Ashley Butler, accuses Thomas' family of siphoning millions from his wife's bank accounts into theirs. Two of the defendants, Thomas' daughter Jeanne Saunders and her husband, George, died in their 60s last year.

notes and repeated refusals to answer questions -- at times reads like a novel: a story of devotion, generosity and betrayal.

And, of course, mystery.

One question, which may not be resolved when the case goes to trial in December, is who betrayed whom.

Another is what became of some $6 million to $7 million of the hospital heiress' $17.7 million fortune.

Answers are hard to come by, with two original defendants dead and a third -- their New York lawyer -- suffering from dementia himself, according to court filings by his former firm. Yet the legal fight lurches on with a life of its own, as court costs mount and all parties refuse to give an inch.

This, of course, raises yet another question: How much of the millions at stake will eventually be swallowed up by legal fees and expenses?

Attorneys on both sides and relatives of Claudine did not respond to requests for comment. Three lawyers present at a recent hearing said they could not speak about the case without their clients' permission -- but they acknowledged with smiles the sheer volume of the case file.

"How many pages are we up to now?" one asked.

One of Thomas' granddaughters, now a defendant in the case, said it has taken an emotional toll.

"This lawsuit has been devastating to everybody in my family," said Brittany Warnock of Bernardsville, N.J. "It's really hard to wrap your mind around what's going on, when you realize none of it is true."

Widow meets widower

Soon after Claudine Barrett Cox was introduced by friends to Thomas F. O'Connor over dinner, she wrote to him, "It is so nice to get to know you, and I'm sorry it ends so quickly."

She followed up with an invitation to visit her that summer at her place in Portugal, Casa Savoia.

"Just a note, a call or a fax and I'll be in Faro to pick you up," she wrote.

A native of southern Illinois, she met her first husband while attending Drury College in Springfield, Mo. Lester Lee "Bud" Cox came from a family that had built a hospital system now known as CoxHealth. They had one son, Lester Barrett "Barry" Cox.

With a doctorate in economics, Claudine taught at several colleges and managed portfolios for family corporations and trust funds. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan named her an alternate on the executive board of the United Nations Children's Fund.

Claudine's 48-year marriage ended with Bud Cox's death in 1993. With her second husband, the woman who was so good with numbers seems to have discovered another side to herself.

In an anniversary card to Thomas -- part of a court-file exhibit -- she recalled their momentous encounter in Sarasota: "I found love the first night we met and I was invited to sit next to you before dinner. I knew there could never be a greater love -- But I was wrong -- Each day, each year has deepened my devotion to you. I didn't know joy until I enjoyed life with you."

Before their marriage in 1998, the couple -- then 70 and 72 -- signed a prenuptial agreement that her $17.7 million and his $1.1 million would remain in separate trusts, court files show. The list of her assets took up 24 pages; his needed just one. Claudine's will left her estate to her son, grandchildren and some charities. Thomas' left his to his daughter, Jeanne Saunders, and son, Gary O'Connor.

Warnock, Thomas' granddaughter and Saunders' daughter, said her family was delighted with her grandfather's happiness in his second marriage.

"They truly adored and loved each other; they enjoyed every moment," she said. "You know how you walk in a room and you're with a couple and you just feel that? That's what it was like to be around Poppa and Claudie."

Warnock said she remembers numerous family visits to Longboat Key, and vacations with the O'Connors.

"We would sit out on their terrace that had this beautiful view of the beach and the ocean," she said. "They were thrilled with that place, and that's where they wanted to stay. And then they wanted to be buried with each other."

Both of the couple's families appear to have been on good terms, meeting at the wedding and visiting socially over the years in each other's homes. But according to court documents, heightened acrimony in 2010 that apparently led to a rupture in early 2011 prompted someone to call the Florida Department of Children and Families, asking for an investigation into possible financial exploitation. The file does not specify who made the call.

After checking on the O'Connors -- and writing a report that was not made public -- that agency filed petitions for incapacity, and the state court appointed guardians for Claudine and Thomas.

In May 2011, the guardian for Claudine disclosed in court records that her trust had dwindled to $4 million while her husband's had grown significantly. The guardian, Butler, sued Thomas' daughter and son-in-law and their attorney, accusing them of colluding with Thomas to exploit Claudine financially after she began showing signs of dementia.

Claudine was removed from her condo at Vizcaya and taken to a nursing home, said Warnock.

"I was told that when they took Claudie away from my grandfather, she was screaming and crying," she said. "To the best of my knowledge, she has been moved up to Philadelphia, where her granddaughter lives."

Thomas is in an assisted-living facility in New Jersey, where Warnock and her sister, Bobbi Collins, visit him three times a week.

"My grandfather is very aware," Warnock said. "He asks about Claudie all the time; he constantly asks how she is. He's devastated. One day they were together, and the next ..."

Versions of reality

This labyrinthine trust litigation has so far involved more than 18 lawyers and at least six judges, more than 1,670 court filings and what one attorney estimated as "probably 40 or 50 thousand pages of discovery."

Many of the documents number more than 100 pages of arguments and exhibits. There have been three appeals to a higher court, mostly unsuccessful.

Ira Wiesner, a longtime Sarasota elder law attorney who is not involved in the case, has seen his share of epic legal battles involving guardians. But even he was impressed by the scope of Butler vs. Saunders when he saw the file.

"Holy Toledo! I don't even know where to begin," he said. "Any time you have $17 million, it's going to be a big case. As they used to say in law school, 'If you want to make it more interesting, just add zeros.' "

Brenda K. Uekert, principal research consultant for the National Center for State Courts, said the lack of data on state guardianships makes it hard to compare this case with others, but added it sounded "highly unusual."

Given the money at stake, she said, its scale is not surprising: "Any time you're working with large pots of money, you have large numbers of attorneys."

Were the millions that flowed from the Cox inheritance to the O'Connor descendants the prize for defrauding a woman no longer capable of handling her finances, as the plaintiff's suit claims?

Or were they the result of Claudine's reasoned and sincere wish to provide for her husband and his family -- to whom she had become closer over the years -- as the defendants maintain?

Warnock said she never saw clear signs of dementia in the O'Connors before the state became involved.

"I think the last time I saw Poppa and Claudie, maybe she might have asked twice if you wanted a cup of coffee," she said.

Her stepfather, defendant George Saunders, said in a sworn deposition that he "noticed significant memory lapses beginning in late 2008" with Claudine, but that she seemed able to manage her own affairs through 2010.

But lawyers for Claudine's guardian assert in court documents that "by January 2005, Claudine's friends and professionals had observed that Claudine was mentally and physically declining," affecting "her memory and her judgment."

The allegation concerning the timing is significant because March 2005 was when large sums began moving from Claudine's trust into Thomas' -- and from there into his daughter's and granddaughters' bank accounts, according to the court record.

The O'Connors' prenuptial agreement limited Thomas' inheritance to $2 million if he outlived Claudine, for his use until his death. After that, any money and homes would revert to her heirs.

In a 2002 amendment, that was changed to $1 million and a life interest in their Missouri home.

In 2004, the lawsuit states, Thomas had a heart attack. Shortly afterward, the O'Connors met again with their Missouri lawyer and had a new estate plan prepared that would allow Claudine to make sizable gifts to her son, Barry.

Then they paid a Christmas visit to Thomas' daughter, Jeanne Saunders, and her husband, George, in New Jersey.

In December 2004, the complaint alleges, "George was provided with the estate plan documents of Claudine and Thomas" and sent them to his New York attorney, Richard Scolaro.

In a January 2005 letter, Scolaro gave George Saunders his opinion, saying, "I think what you should be sensitive to is the only way Thomas really receives anything is (a) if he and Claudine are married as of Claudine's death, and (b) he survives Claudine. Other than that, he gets nothing, nor does his family."

At this point the O'Connors moved from Missouri to Florida, and Claudine gave $2 million to Thomas -- according to her handwritten note in the case file on March 4, 2005, "to do as he pleases during my life, or following my death."

It is also where their history diverges into two starkly different interpretations.

'How dare you!'

The lawsuit claims that, from this time in 2005, Thomas schemed with Jeanne and George Saunders and attorney Richard Scolaro to move millions more from Claudine's trust to Thomas and his family, in the form of gifts, deferred-interest loans and investments in New Jersey businesses run by George.

"After the move to Florida in 2005," the complaint states, "Thomas stopped all communications with the Cox family's longtime professionals and began to isolate Claudine from her family and friends."

Thomas monitored Claudine's phone calls, the lawsuit claims, and interfered with doctors' treatments "in order to hide Claudine's memory deficiencies that continued to worsen over time."

From 2005 to 2010, according to the complaint, Thomas, the Saunderses and their daughters Warnock and Collier used Claudine's money to pay for "country club dues, credit cards, expensive vacations, private school tuitions and furniture."

By 2007, Butler argued, Claudine and Thomas were suffering from memory deficiencies.

It was a Sept. 6, 2010, "gifting plan" presented by George Saunders to Thomas, the lawsuit states, that turned Thomas against the Saunderses. It suggested that the couple transfer $770,000 of investments in the New Jersey businesses to Thomas' family members, make annual $24,000 gifts to eight descendants and pay tuitions for six grandchildren, with other gifts and "family loans as needed for business, mortgages and real estate."

On a copy of the gifting plan in the court file, Thomas wrote, "This is not acceptable!" He added, in large block letters, "Georgie How Dare You!"

Angry with his daughter and son-in-law, the suit claims, Thomas began working with his son Gary O'Connor and the Scolaro law firm to revise the O'Connors' estate plan yet again. After receiving these revisions, the complaint says, "Thomas became angry and notified Claudine's family members that his family had improperly obtained assets owned by him and Claudine."

After this, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services got the phone call.

'With no warning'

The defendants -- acknowledging the gifts and loans from Claudine to Thomas and his family -- tell the story differently.

In depositions, Thomas' granddaughters and son-in-law described Claudine as a very bright woman, deeply interested in education and eager to fund tuitions and meet their other child-related expenses.

"Tom and Claudie always wanted to know how they could help," Collier testified. Asked about how they came to pay country club dues for the Colliers, she said, "I assume that we were talking about joining the Hunt Club and they offered to pay for it. They liked to watch our kids skate."

"To be quite honest with you," Warnock testified, "Poppa and Claudie offered countless times to help with bills or school or anything. They were always offering, always. They got a lot of joy out of being generous."

George Saunders testified that he performed logistical services for the O'Connors -- arranging travel, for instance -- for which he was paid $2,000 per month. When they asked him in December 2004 to recommend an estate attorney, he sent their new documents to his friend Scolaro for an opinion.

Claudine planned to give her son Barry $2.7 million to buy a home in Telluride, Colo., Saunders testified, and the O'Connors did not want to use the Missouri attorney they had shared with Barry Cox. Thomas and Claudine "didn't trust Barry," he testified. Efforts to contact Barry Cox at numbers listed for him in Colorado and California were not successful.

Claudine also worried, Saunders said under oath, about whether Thomas would have enough money if he outlived her.

"She was always very concerned, from the time that I met her, that Tom would be taken care of if something happened to her," Saunders said in his deposition, calling this "her No. 1 concern."

Saunders maintained that he never knew the extent of Claudine's fortune, and his only involvement in her estate was to help arrange the $2.7 million transfer to her son -- a deferred-interest loan to avoid gift taxes -- in September 2005.

Saunders said he believed "acrimony" between Thomas and Barry began building with Claudine's $2 million gift to her husband in March 2005.

"She said that Barry got very angry when that happened," Saunders testified, "and accused her of giving away his grandfather's money, and she had no right to do that."

In the fall of 2010, tensions appear to have escalated. On a visit to New Jersey in September 2010, Saunders testified, Thomas wrote his daughter Jeanne a check for $150,000 -- but when the Saunderses came to Longboat Key two months later, Thomas accused Jeanne of forging a check that he didn't remember writing.

Thomas wrote other large personal checks during this time, two for $50,000 each for Warnock and $100,000 for Collier, the court file shows. George Saunders testified that at the time he was unaware of these gifts to his stepdaughters.

He noticed in September 2010, he added, that Claudine seemed "a little more forgetful." And in November, when Thomas accused his daughter of forgery and then recanted, Jeanne and George Saunders became worried about him.

"I think that it became obvious to both Jeanne and myself that Tom's attitude was different," Saunders testified, "meaning that he seemed to be at one moment friendly and the next moment hostile."

Jeanne and George Saunders knew from Gary O'Connor that Claudine and Thomas were drafting new legal documents. But the first he heard of the state's involvement, he said in the deposition, was in late March 2011, when Thomas "kept calling and saying that he needed our help because there were people in his apartment that he couldn't -- that wouldn't leave."

The Saunderses arrived at the Vizcaya condo, he said, to find Barry Cox and his daughter Amanda there, along with caretakers who had been hired by the state.

"This was sprung on Tom with no warning," George Saunders said in an email to a lawyer in the Scolaro firm on March 22 that is included in the court file. "If Claudine's son or niece really think that she was being isolated or taken advantage of, where have they been the last five years? At no time did any of Claudie's family ever approach us and express concern about Claudine's well-being. Why?"

The file includes a second email he sent two minutes later:

"The most important point of all," George Saunders wrote, "is that if they take Claudine away from Tom against her wishes, that may be a death sentence because her life is centered around Tom. Having more in-home help may be appropriate, but separating them would be cruel."

The missing defense

One defendant who has not supplied his version of the O'Connors' story is Richard Scolaro, 77, the New York attorney who retired in 2012. Court filings by his former legal firm claim he has dementia and is not competent to defend himself.

The firm, also a defendant, has been reconstituted with different attorneys. Claiming it was "improperly named as a defendant" it has denied all allegations in the suit that may apply to it.

Scolaro has so far not submitted to a court order for a doctor's examination, although a stay in proceedings against him has been lifted. This month, his attorney objected to an attempt to subpoena a disability claim from his insurance company.

In a transcript of a hearing early this year before Judge Dubensky, Butler's attorney, Kimberly Bald, complained that the law firm had been resisting discovery requests.

"They're saying, 'We don't have the records; we can't give you the information; and some of the information you're asking for, the only person that would know is Mr. Scolaro and he's incompetent,'" Bald said.

Dubensky asked the firm's attorney, James E. Moon, if Scolaro was unfit to testify.

On Feb. 18, 2013, Jeanne Saunders died of cancer at the age of 65. Her husband, George, died at the same hospital less than two months later, on April 16, at the age of 69.

Warnock said the pressures of Butler vs. Saunders hastened their deaths.

"For my mother and George, the amount of stress it created for them directly contributed to their health problems," she said. "When my mom was going through cancer treatment, she was being served all these papers. They had to be signed by her oncologist, and that wasn't good enough; they all had to be notarized."

Warnock said she and her sister feel they have been left on their own to battle accusations that they do not understand.

"My parents protected Bobbi and I, telling us not to worry and who to talk to and what lawyers to hire," she said. "When my stepdad, George, was in the ICU, being intubated, he was awake and trying to tell us things about the lawsuit."

In early March of this year, the plaintiffs moved to add claims for punitive damages against the defendants, for alleged fraudulent acts. A trial is scheduled for Dec. 8, involving dozens of witnesses who must be flown to Sarasota and put up in hotels.

An attempt to schedule the trial at a less expensive time of year was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the daunting paper storm of motions and petitions continues. No estimate of the costs to date is available. But some bills for attorneys' fees are for tens of thousands of dollars.

As plaintiff's attorney Bald observed during a recent hearing, "Nothing has been easy in this case."

Despite a recent attempt at mediation, Warnock said she and her family see no way out of Butler vs. Saunders, except to go to trial.

"Justice will be served and this will go away eventually," she said, sounding weary. "We're going to try and prove our innocence, I guess."

<p>When a 70-year-old Missouri hospital-chain heiress met a retired Bacardi rum salesman on a May night in 1997, they fell -- in her words -- "deeply in love."</p><p>Finding each other so late in life made them reluctant to be apart. "Kiss the pillow for me," Claudine O'Connor wrote to her husband, Thomas, when she had to spend a night alone. On their fourth wedding anniversary, she promised "to do everything possible to make each future year as perfect as the last."</p><p>Now Claudine, 87, and Thomas, 88, both have dementia, according to doctors. They live in separate states, reportedly looked after by granddaughters, and have not seen each other since shortly after they became wards of the state of Florida in the spring of 2011.</p><p>All that's left of their marriage is a complicated and costly three-year lawsuit known as "Butler vs. Saunders."</p><p>Neither Claudine nor Thomas have any say in the tangle of matters before 12th Judicial Circuit Judge Peter A. Dubensky. The Longboat Key condo where the two liked to watch the evening sun drop into the Gulf -- and reportedly hoped to live out their days -- has been sold.</p><p>Both have been declared legally incapacitated because of their dementia, and both have professional guardians who handle their finances and pay attorneys to speak for them in court. Both have relatives, living outside Florida, who have been drawn into the case over the last three years.</p><p>The suit, filed in Sarasota by Claudine's guardian, Ashley Butler, accuses Thomas' family of siphoning millions from his wife's bank accounts into theirs. Two of the defendants, Thomas' daughter Jeanne Saunders and her husband, George, died in their 60s last year.</p><p>The swelling case file -- studded with copies of accounting ledger entries and love</p><p>notes and repeated refusals to answer questions -- at times reads like a novel: a story of devotion, generosity and betrayal.</p><p>And, of course, mystery.</p><p>One question, which may not be resolved when the case goes to trial in December, is who betrayed whom.</p><p>Another is what became of some $6 million to $7 million of the hospital heiress' $17.7 million fortune.</p><p>Answers are hard to come by, with two original defendants dead and a third -- their New York lawyer -- suffering from dementia himself, according to court filings by his former firm. Yet the legal fight lurches on with a life of its own, as court costs mount and all parties refuse to give an inch.</p><p>This, of course, raises yet another question: How much of the millions at stake will eventually be swallowed up by legal fees and expenses?</p><p>Attorneys on both sides and relatives of Claudine did not respond to requests for comment. Three lawyers present at a recent hearing said they could not speak about the case without their clients' permission -- but they acknowledged with smiles the sheer volume of the case file.</p><p>"How many pages are we up to now?" one asked.</p><p>One of Thomas' granddaughters, now a defendant in the case, said it has taken an emotional toll.</p><p>"This lawsuit has been devastating to everybody in my family," said Brittany Warnock of Bernardsville, N.J. "It's really hard to wrap your mind around what's going on, when you realize none of it is true."</p><p>Widow meets widower</p><p>Soon after Claudine Barrett Cox was introduced by friends to Thomas F. O'Connor over dinner, she wrote to him, "It is so nice to get to know you, and I'm sorry it ends so quickly."</p><p>She followed up with an invitation to visit her that summer at her place in Portugal, Casa Savoia.</p><p>"Just a note, a call or a fax and I'll be in Faro to pick you up," she wrote.</p><p>A native of southern Illinois, she met her first husband while attending Drury College in Springfield, Mo. Lester Lee "Bud" Cox came from a family that had built a hospital system now known as CoxHealth. They had one son, Lester Barrett "Barry" Cox.</p><p>With a doctorate in economics, Claudine taught at several colleges and managed portfolios for family corporations and trust funds. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan named her an alternate on the executive board of the United Nations Children's Fund.</p><p>Claudine's 48-year marriage ended with Bud Cox's death in 1993. With her second husband, the woman who was so good with numbers seems to have discovered another side to herself.</p><p>In an anniversary card to Thomas -- part of a court-file exhibit -- she recalled their momentous encounter in Sarasota: "I found love the first night we met and I was invited to sit next to you before dinner. I knew there could never be a greater love -- But I was wrong -- Each day, each year has deepened my devotion to you. I didn't know joy until I enjoyed life with you."</p><p>Before their marriage in 1998, the couple -- then 70 and 72 -- signed a prenuptial agreement that her $17.7 million and his $1.1 million would remain in separate trusts, court files show. The list of her assets took up 24 pages; his needed just one. Claudine's will left her estate to her son, grandchildren and some charities. Thomas' left his to his daughter, Jeanne Saunders, and son, Gary O'Connor.</p><p>Warnock, Thomas' granddaughter and Saunders' daughter, said her family was delighted with her grandfather's happiness in his second marriage.</p><p>"They truly adored and loved each other; they enjoyed every moment," she said. "You know how you walk in a room and you're with a couple and you just feel that? That's what it was like to be around Poppa and Claudie."</p><p>Warnock said she remembers numerous family visits to Longboat Key, and vacations with the O'Connors.</p><p>"We would sit out on their terrace that had this beautiful view of the beach and the ocean," she said. "They were thrilled with that place, and that's where they wanted to stay. And then they wanted to be buried with each other."</p><p>Both of the couple's families appear to have been on good terms, meeting at the wedding and visiting socially over the years in each other's homes. But according to court documents, heightened acrimony in 2010 that apparently led to a rupture in early 2011 prompted someone to call the Florida Department of Children and Families, asking for an investigation into possible financial exploitation. The file does not specify who made the call.</p><p>After checking on the O'Connors -- and writing a report that was not made public -- that agency filed petitions for incapacity, and the state court appointed guardians for Claudine and Thomas.</p><p>In May 2011, the guardian for Claudine disclosed in court records that her trust had dwindled to $4 million while her husband's had grown significantly. The guardian, Butler, sued Thomas' daughter and son-in-law and their attorney, accusing them of colluding with Thomas to exploit Claudine financially after she began showing signs of dementia.</p><p>Claudine was removed from her condo at Vizcaya and taken to a nursing home, said Warnock.</p><p>"I was told that when they took Claudie away from my grandfather, she was screaming and crying," she said. "To the best of my knowledge, she has been moved up to Philadelphia, where her granddaughter lives."</p><p>Thomas is in an assisted-living facility in New Jersey, where Warnock and her sister, Bobbi Collins, visit him three times a week.</p><p>"My grandfather is very aware," Warnock said. "He asks about Claudie all the time; he constantly asks how she is. He's devastated. One day they were together, and the next ..."</p><p>Versions of reality</p><p>This labyrinthine trust litigation has so far involved more than 18 lawyers and at least six judges, more than 1,670 court filings and what one attorney estimated as "probably 40 or 50 thousand pages of discovery."</p><p>Many of the documents number more than 100 pages of arguments and exhibits. There have been three appeals to a higher court, mostly unsuccessful.</p><p>Ira Wiesner, a longtime Sarasota elder law attorney who is not involved in the case, has seen his share of epic legal battles involving guardians. But even he was impressed by the scope of Butler vs. Saunders when he saw the file.</p><p>"Holy Toledo! I don't even know where to begin," he said. "Any time you have $17 million, it's going to be a big case. As they used to say in law school, 'If you want to make it more interesting, just add zeros.' "</p><p>Brenda K. Uekert, principal research consultant for the National Center for State Courts, said the lack of data on state guardianships makes it hard to compare this case with others, but added it sounded "highly unusual."</p><p>Given the money at stake, she said, its scale is not surprising: "Any time you're working with large pots of money, you have large numbers of attorneys."</p><p>Were the millions that flowed from the Cox inheritance to the O'Connor descendants the prize for defrauding a woman no longer capable of handling her finances, as the plaintiff's suit claims?</p><p>Or were they the result of Claudine's reasoned and sincere wish to provide for her husband and his family -- to whom she had become closer over the years -- as the defendants maintain?</p><p>Warnock said she never saw clear signs of dementia in the O'Connors before the state became involved.</p><p>"I think the last time I saw Poppa and Claudie, maybe she might have asked twice if you wanted a cup of coffee," she said.</p><p>Her stepfather, defendant George Saunders, said in a sworn deposition that he "noticed significant memory lapses beginning in late 2008" with Claudine, but that she seemed able to manage her own affairs through 2010.</p><p>But lawyers for Claudine's guardian assert in court documents that "by January 2005, Claudine's friends and professionals had observed that Claudine was mentally and physically declining," affecting "her memory and her judgment."</p><p>The allegation concerning the timing is significant because March 2005 was when large sums began moving from Claudine's trust into Thomas' -- and from there into his daughter's and granddaughters' bank accounts, according to the court record.</p><p>The O'Connors' prenuptial agreement limited Thomas' inheritance to $2 million if he outlived Claudine, for his use until his death. After that, any money and homes would revert to her heirs.</p><p>In a 2002 amendment, that was changed to $1 million and a life interest in their Missouri home.</p><p>In 2004, the lawsuit states, Thomas had a heart attack. Shortly afterward, the O'Connors met again with their Missouri lawyer and had a new estate plan prepared that would allow Claudine to make sizable gifts to her son, Barry.</p><p>Then they paid a Christmas visit to Thomas' daughter, Jeanne Saunders, and her husband, George, in New Jersey.</p><p>In December 2004, the complaint alleges, "George was provided with the estate plan documents of Claudine and Thomas" and sent them to his New York attorney, Richard Scolaro.</p><p>In a January 2005 letter, Scolaro gave George Saunders his opinion, saying, "I think what you should be sensitive to is the only way Thomas really receives anything is (a) if he and Claudine are married as of Claudine's death, and (b) he survives Claudine. Other than that, he gets nothing, nor does his family."</p><p>At this point the O'Connors moved from Missouri to Florida, and Claudine gave $2 million to Thomas -- according to her handwritten note in the case file on March 4, 2005, "to do as he pleases during my life, or following my death."</p><p>It is also where their history diverges into two starkly different interpretations.</p><p>'How dare you!'</p><p>The lawsuit claims that, from this time in 2005, Thomas schemed with Jeanne and George Saunders and attorney Richard Scolaro to move millions more from Claudine's trust to Thomas and his family, in the form of gifts, deferred-interest loans and investments in New Jersey businesses run by George.</p><p>"After the move to Florida in 2005," the complaint states, "Thomas stopped all communications with the Cox family's longtime professionals and began to isolate Claudine from her family and friends."</p><p>Thomas monitored Claudine's phone calls, the lawsuit claims, and interfered with doctors' treatments "in order to hide Claudine's memory deficiencies that continued to worsen over time."</p><p>From 2005 to 2010, according to the complaint, Thomas, the Saunderses and their daughters Warnock and Collier used Claudine's money to pay for "country club dues, credit cards, expensive vacations, private school tuitions and furniture."</p><p>By 2007, Butler argued, Claudine and Thomas were suffering from memory deficiencies.</p><p>It was a Sept. 6, 2010, "gifting plan" presented by George Saunders to Thomas, the lawsuit states, that turned Thomas against the Saunderses. It suggested that the couple transfer $770,000 of investments in the New Jersey businesses to Thomas' family members, make annual $24,000 gifts to eight descendants and pay tuitions for six grandchildren, with other gifts and "family loans as needed for business, mortgages and real estate."</p><p>On a copy of the gifting plan in the court file, Thomas wrote, "This is not acceptable!" He added, in large block letters, "Georgie How Dare You!"</p><p>Angry with his daughter and son-in-law, the suit claims, Thomas began working with his son Gary O'Connor and the Scolaro law firm to revise the O'Connors' estate plan yet again. After receiving these revisions, the complaint says, "Thomas became angry and notified Claudine's family members that his family had improperly obtained assets owned by him and Claudine."</p><p>After this, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services got the phone call.</p><p>'With no warning'</p><p>The defendants -- acknowledging the gifts and loans from Claudine to Thomas and his family -- tell the story differently.</p><p>In depositions, Thomas' granddaughters and son-in-law described Claudine as a very bright woman, deeply interested in education and eager to fund tuitions and meet their other child-related expenses.</p><p>"Tom and Claudie always wanted to know how they could help," Collier testified. Asked about how they came to pay country club dues for the Colliers, she said, "I assume that we were talking about joining the Hunt Club and they offered to pay for it. They liked to watch our kids skate."</p><p>"To be quite honest with you," Warnock testified, "Poppa and Claudie offered countless times to help with bills or school or anything. They were always offering, always. They got a lot of joy out of being generous."</p><p>George Saunders testified that he performed logistical services for the O'Connors -- arranging travel, for instance -- for which he was paid $2,000 per month. When they asked him in December 2004 to recommend an estate attorney, he sent their new documents to his friend Scolaro for an opinion.</p><p>Claudine planned to give her son Barry $2.7 million to buy a home in Telluride, Colo., Saunders testified, and the O'Connors did not want to use the Missouri attorney they had shared with Barry Cox. Thomas and Claudine "didn't trust Barry," he testified. Efforts to contact Barry Cox at numbers listed for him in Colorado and California were not successful.</p><p>Claudine also worried, Saunders said under oath, about whether Thomas would have enough money if he outlived her.</p><p>"She was always very concerned, from the time that I met her, that Tom would be taken care of if something happened to her," Saunders said in his deposition, calling this "her No. 1 concern."</p><p>Saunders maintained that he never knew the extent of Claudine's fortune, and his only involvement in her estate was to help arrange the $2.7 million transfer to her son -- a deferred-interest loan to avoid gift taxes -- in September 2005.</p><p>Saunders said he believed "acrimony" between Thomas and Barry began building with Claudine's $2 million gift to her husband in March 2005.</p><p>"She said that Barry got very angry when that happened," Saunders testified, "and accused her of giving away his grandfather's money, and she had no right to do that."</p><p>In the fall of 2010, tensions appear to have escalated. On a visit to New Jersey in September 2010, Saunders testified, Thomas wrote his daughter Jeanne a check for $150,000 -- but when the Saunderses came to Longboat Key two months later, Thomas accused Jeanne of forging a check that he didn't remember writing.</p><p>Thomas wrote other large personal checks during this time, two for $50,000 each for Warnock and $100,000 for Collier, the court file shows. George Saunders testified that at the time he was unaware of these gifts to his stepdaughters.</p><p>He noticed in September 2010, he added, that Claudine seemed "a little more forgetful." And in November, when Thomas accused his daughter of forgery and then recanted, Jeanne and George Saunders became worried about him.</p><p>"I think that it became obvious to both Jeanne and myself that Tom's attitude was different," Saunders testified, "meaning that he seemed to be at one moment friendly and the next moment hostile."</p><p>Jeanne and George Saunders knew from Gary O'Connor that Claudine and Thomas were drafting new legal documents. But the first he heard of the state's involvement, he said in the deposition, was in late March 2011, when Thomas "kept calling and saying that he needed our help because there were people in his apartment that he couldn't -- that wouldn't leave."</p><p>The Saunderses arrived at the Vizcaya condo, he said, to find Barry Cox and his daughter Amanda there, along with caretakers who had been hired by the state.</p><p>"This was sprung on Tom with no warning," George Saunders said in an email to a lawyer in the Scolaro firm on March 22 that is included in the court file. "If Claudine's son or niece really think that she was being isolated or taken advantage of, where have they been the last five years? At no time did any of Claudie's family ever approach us and express concern about Claudine's well-being. Why?"</p><p>The file includes a second email he sent two minutes later:</p><p>"The most important point of all," George Saunders wrote, "is that if they take Claudine away from Tom against her wishes, that may be a death sentence because her life is centered around Tom. Having more in-home help may be appropriate, but separating them would be cruel."</p><p>The missing defense</p><p>One defendant who has not supplied his version of the O'Connors' story is Richard Scolaro, 77, the New York attorney who retired in 2012. Court filings by his former legal firm claim he has dementia and is not competent to defend himself.</p><p>The firm, also a defendant, has been reconstituted with different attorneys. Claiming it was "improperly named as a defendant" it has denied all allegations in the suit that may apply to it.</p><p>Scolaro has so far not submitted to a court order for a doctor's examination, although a stay in proceedings against him has been lifted. This month, his attorney objected to an attempt to subpoena a disability claim from his insurance company.</p><p>In a transcript of a hearing early this year before Judge Dubensky, Butler's attorney, Kimberly Bald, complained that the law firm had been resisting discovery requests.</p><p>"They're saying, 'We don't have the records; we can't give you the information; and some of the information you're asking for, the only person that would know is Mr. Scolaro and he's incompetent,'" Bald said.</p><p>Dubensky asked the firm's attorney, James E. Moon, if Scolaro was unfit to testify.</p><p>"Oh, absolutely, Judge," Moon said. "That guy's gone. He's out there."</p><p>On Feb. 18, 2013, Jeanne Saunders died of cancer at the age of 65. Her husband, George, died at the same hospital less than two months later, on April 16, at the age of 69.</p><p>Warnock said the pressures of Butler vs. Saunders hastened their deaths.</p><p>"For my mother and George, the amount of stress it created for them directly contributed to their health problems," she said. "When my mom was going through cancer treatment, she was being served all these papers. They had to be signed by her oncologist, and that wasn't good enough; they all had to be notarized."</p><p>Warnock said she and her sister feel they have been left on their own to battle accusations that they do not understand.</p><p>"My parents protected Bobbi and I, telling us not to worry and who to talk to and what lawyers to hire," she said. "When my stepdad, George, was in the ICU, being intubated, he was awake and trying to tell us things about the lawsuit."</p><p>In early March of this year, the plaintiffs moved to add claims for punitive damages against the defendants, for alleged fraudulent acts. A trial is scheduled for Dec. 8, involving dozens of witnesses who must be flown to Sarasota and put up in hotels.</p><p>An attempt to schedule the trial at a less expensive time of year was unsuccessful.</p><p>Meanwhile, the daunting paper storm of motions and petitions continues. No estimate of the costs to date is available. But some bills for attorneys' fees are for tens of thousands of dollars.</p><p>As plaintiff's attorney Bald observed during a recent hearing, "Nothing has been easy in this case."</p><p>Despite a recent attempt at mediation, Warnock said she and her family see no way out of Butler vs. Saunders, except to go to trial.</p><p>"Justice will be served and this will go away eventually," she said, sounding weary. "We're going to try and prove our innocence, I guess."</p>